J. Comyns Carr: Stray Memories, by His Wife

								

ill lit and my excitement over the play was too great.
I had but lately arrived from Italy--having cajoled my father, then
English chaplain at Genoa, into letting me “see London”
under the care of my brother, resident there; so that I had just
been shot from the socially restricted life of a parson’s
daughter in the small English colony of a small foreign town into the
comparative Bohemianism of the artistic set in the London of that day
best described by my husband himself in the introduction to his book
Coasting Bohemia.
There was much that must have been, unconsciously to myself, of
rare educational advantage in the lovely scenery and picturesque
surroundings of my childhood’s life on the Riviera and in the
Apennines; and my parents so loved both Nature and Art that they gave
us constant change of opportunity in these directions. Yet I must
confess that as I grew up, the chestnut groves of the Apennines and
the shores of the blue Mediterranean became empty joys to me, and
even the comparative excitement of wearing my own and criticizing my
friends’ frocks in the Public Gardens of Genoa or the keener
delight of an occasional dance in a stately palace, was insufficient
to fill my cravings; and I longed for freedom and the attractions
of the world--more especially in London, which I only knew through
visits to relatives during the holidays of a short period of my life
at a Brighton school. And it was from the house of specially strict
relatives that I definitely escaped that evening, to come to the wicked
French play with my brother and his friend and housemate, Mr. Frederick
Jameson, an architect by profession, but incidentally a distinguished
musician--in later years the translator of the Wagner libretti.
Mr. Comyns Carr, to whom they introduced me, sat behind us; and, though
he often told me that he marked me down as I came in, and somehow
associated me with the personality of Aimée Desclée herself, I took
small heed of him then, and when, as we sought a cab at the close of
the performance, he volunteered to go back and search for a valueless
brooch which I had lost, I did not have the grace to insist on waiting
for his return before we hurried off.
But I was not to be punished; that very incident furnished occasion for
a next meeting.
Through my brother he tracked me to a Bloomsbury boarding-house,
whereto insubordination to the deserved reproof of the conventional
relatives had made me condemn myself.
Oh, that boarding-house--with the city clerk’s bon mot,
“Why are you like the spoon resting in your tea?” And the
spinster convinced that the Italian Stornelli I sang in the evening
must be “improper!” Could I have endured it if Mr. Jameson
and my brother had not started the glorious idea of theatricals in
their rooms hard by in Great Russell Street? And if, on the second day
of my sojourn, the lodging-house slavey had not burst into the wee